L&B Blog – Page 56 – Education & Teacher Conferences

Older posts

Newer posts

Surprise! The Unexpected Outdoor Class Advantage

Andrew Watson

February 11, 2018

Surprise! The Unexpected Outdoor Class Advantage

“Can we have class outside today?”

If you’re like me, you get this question often. Especially on a beautiful spring day…

But do your students have a point? Might there be good reasons to move class outside every now and then?

Outdoor Class Advantage: What We Know

We’ve already got research suggesting that your students might be on to something.

Some researchers suggest that classes outside help restore student attention.

Other studies (here and here) indicated that they might enhance student motivation as well.

We’ve even got reason to think that exposure to green landscape helps students learn. For example: this study in Michigan suggests that natural views improve graduation rate and standardized test scores.

None of the evidence is completely persuasive, but each additional piece makes the argument even stronger.

Outdoor Class Advantage: Today’s News

If I’m a skeptic about outdoor class, I might make the following argument. Outdoor classes might be good for that particular class. However, they might be bad for subsequent classes.

That is: students might be so amped up by their time outside that they can’t focus when they get back indoors.

To explore this concern, Ming Kuo and colleagues put together an impressive study.

Over ten weeks, two teachers taught several pairs of lessons. Half of the time, the first lesson was taught outside. For the other half, the first lesson was taught inside.

Researchers then measured students’ attentiveness during the second lesson in these pairs.

The results?

The Results!

Students were more attentive — A LOT more attentive — after outdoor classes than indoor classes.

In almost 50% of the lessons, attention was a full standard deviation higher after outdoor classes. In 20% of the lessons, it was two standard deviations higher.

Technically speaking, that difference is HUGE.

(By the way: the researchers came up with several different ways to measure attention. Outdoor classes led to improved attention in four of the five measures.)

The Implications

This research suggests that teachers needn’t worry about outdoor classes leading to distraction in subsequent classes.

That finding doesn’t necessarily mean that outdoor classes benefit learning, but it does mean we have fewer potential causes for concern.

Andrew Watson

February 09, 2018

Getting the Best Advice about Learning

Occasionally I try to persuade people that neuroscience is fantastically complicated. In other words: we shouldn’t beat ourselves up if we don’t master it all.

Today I spotted a headline that makes my point for me:

Hippocampus-driven feed-forward inhibition of the prefrontal cortex mediates relapse of extinguished fear

Got that?

What’s the Bigger Point?

Neuroscience is simply fascinating. As teachers, we really want to know how neurons work. And synapses. And brain regions — like the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.

However, specific teaching advice almost always comes from psychology. How do teachers help students connect neurons to create memories? Psychology. What classroom strategies support executive function in the prefrontal cortex? Psychology.

At a LatB Conference, you’ll enjoy the neuroscience talks because they show you what’s going on underneath the hood. At the psychology talks, you’ll get specific classroom suggestions.

The best conference experience, in my opinion, combines both.

Andrew Watson

February 07, 2018

You Are Not a Nile Grass Rat…

I’ve seen the same headline three times in my newsfeed today: “Dim Light Might Make You Dumber.”

One summary includes this teaser:

“Spending too much time in dimly lit rooms and offices may actually change the brain’s structure and hurt one’s ability to remember and learn.”

That’s a fascinating — and potentially alarming — research finding. At a minimum, it seems to have important implications for classroom design.

Here’s a key detail to remember: this study was done on Nile grass rats.

No, really. Rats. (I assume rats that live in Nile grass.)

Teachers Should Read Research Skeptically

Rat research is essential for neuroscientists. A great deal of our neuro-knowledge comes from animal studies.

So, too, in psychology. Watching primate behavior (and even pigeon behavior) helps us understand human behavior.

But, here’s the key point to remember: your students are not rats. (Depending on the grade you teach, they might occasionally remind you of rats. But, they’re really not.)

Teachers should pay close attention to neuroscience and psychology research done on people. However, you should NEVER change your teaching practice based on research into non-human animals.

Once More, with Feeling…

I want to go back to the quotation I cited above:

“Spending too much time in dimly lit rooms and offices may actually change the brain’s structure and hurt one’s ability to remember and learn.”

In your experience, how much time do rats spend in their offices?

According to Wikipedia, the natural habitats of the African rat are “dry savanna, moist savanna, subtropical or tropical moist shrubland, arable land, pastureland, rural gardens, urban areas, irrigated land, and seasonally flooded agricultural land.”

There’s no indication that rats ever go to the office.

Clearly, someone has already extrapolated the conclusions of this research to assume it applies to people. Until it has, in fact, been tested on people, you should not make the same mistake.

Do Musicians Really Have Better Memories?

Andrew Watson

February 05, 2018

Do Musicians Really Have Better Memories?

Here’s a provocative claim for you: “musicians have better memories than non-musicians.”

But, do we have research to support that claim?

According to a meta-analysis published back in October of 2017, the answer is: “mostly yes.”

What do we know about musician memory?

Reseachers in Padua, Italy examined 29 different memory studies, sorting them into categories of long-term, short-term, and working memory.

In all three categories, musician memory averaged higher on various tests than non-musician memory. (They defined “musician” as someone who had enrolled in a conservatory or music school, and “non-musician” as someone who had little musical training.)

The effect size was “small” for long-term memory, and “moderate” for short-term and working memory.

(For the stats pros in the house, Hedges’s g was 0.29 for LTM, 0.57 for STM, and 0.56 for WM.)

The Plot Thickens

Of course, the story gets more complex. After all, we have different ways of testing these memory skills.

So, for example, we might test people on their ability to remember musical tones. In that case, it’s not at all surprising that musicians have better memory.

But when we test their verbal ability, or their visuo-spatial ability, what do we find?

In long-term memory, it’s all the same. Musicians consistently have (slightly) higher scores than non-musicians.

For short-term memory and working memory, these tests matter. In verbal tests, musicians’ STM and WM still average higher, but not as much as overall. In visuo-spatial tests, the differences basically vanishes.

How to explain these differences?

It’s not surprising that music training might help with verbal capacities. Our ability to process and read language does depend significantly on our ability to process tone and rhythm.

However, music isn’t so directly related to processing of spatial information, and so might not provide enough training to make a difference.

How do we interpret these differences?

Before we conclude that music training causes better memory, we should consider an alternative explanation. Perhaps music requires better memory, and so only those with very good memory skills ever enroll in a conservatory.

If that explanation isn’t true, then we arrive at a surprising conclusion: just maybe it IS possible to train working memory.

Regular readers of this blog know that there’s a lot of skepticism about WM training programs. They’re often expensive and time consuming, and don’t consistently produce results outside of the psychology lab.

It would be thrilling to know that music lessons not only help people make music, but also boost this essential cognitive capacity.

At the same time, we should keep two cautions in mind.

First: it takes A LOT of music training to get into conservatory. People with WM difficulties just might not have that much extra time.

Second: this study doesn’t show that music training leads to greater learning of, say, math and reading. When we worry about students’ working memory, we typically want them to make greater progress in disciplines such as these.

Last Notes

These cautions aside, this study seems like wonderful news. Creating music is good for the soul. And, studying music just might be good for our memory systems as well.

Motivating Retrieval Practice: Money Doesn’t Help

Andrew Watson

February 03, 2018

Motivating Retrieval Practice: Money Doesn’t Help

Given all the benefits that come from retrieval practice, we should surely encourage our students to use this technique as much as possible. How can we best motivate them to do so?

Three researchers in Europe offer this answer: subtly.

More specifically, their research finds that offering students extrinsic rewards for their retrieval practice reduced its effectiveness.

Students offered rewards made more mistakes when they first tried to recall information, and–even taking those initial errors into account–remembered less than their fellow students who had received no enticement to practice.

In this study, the extrinsic rewards were cash payments: students received a euro for every correct answer. In schools, we rarely pay students money to get correct answers. However, we quite often pay them with grades.

This study suggests that retrieval practice should–as much as possible–come in the form of very-low-stakes or no-stakes retrieval.

Top Neuroscience Stories of 2017, Wisely Annotated

Andrew Watson

February 01, 2018

Headline 1: Neuroscience can tell us such cool stuff!

Gosh darnit: people who swear more are more likely to be honest, and less likely to be deceptive. Dad gummity.

If music literally gives you chills, you might have unusual levels of connectivity between your auditory cortex and emotional processing centers.

People with very high IQs (above 130) are more prone to anxiety than others.

A double hand transplant (!) leads to remarkable levels of brain rewiring (!).

Forests can help your amygdala develop, especially if you live near them.

When you look a baby in the eyes, your brain waves just might be synchronizing.

Headline 2: Your gut is your “second brain”

Amazingly, fully one quarter of the 20 top stories focus on the connection between the brain and the digestive system. For example:

Traumatic Brain Injury Causes Intestinal Damage
Research Suggests Connection between Gut Bacteria and Emotion
New Light on Link between Gut Bacteria and Anxiety
Your Mood Depends on the Food You Eat
Gut Microbes May Talk to the Brain through Cortisol

This “aha” moment — our guts and our brains are deeply interconnected! — happens over and over, and yet hasn’t fully been taken on board in the teaching and understanding of neuroscience.

Teachers should watch this research pool. It will, over the years, undoubtedly be increasingly helpful in our work.

Headline 3: Neuroscience and psychology disagree about definitions of ADHD

A psychologist diagnoses ADHD by looking at behavior and using the DSM V.

If a student shows a particular set of behaviors over time, and if they interfere with her life, then that psychologist gives a diagnosis.

However, a 2017 study suggests that these ADHD behaviors might be very different in their underlying neural causes.

Think of it this way. I might have chest pains because of costochondritis — inflammation of cartilage around the sternum. Or I might have chest paints because I’m having a heart attack.

It’s really important to understand the underlying causes so we get the treatment right.

The same just might be true for ADHD. If the surface symptoms are the same, but the underlying neural causes are different, we might need differing treatments for students with similar behavior.

By the way, the same point is true for anxiety and depression.

Headline 4: Each year we learn more about brain disorders

Alzheimer’s might result, in part, from bacteria in the brain. Buildup of urea might result in dementia. Impaired production of myelin might lead to schizophrenia. Oxidative stress might result in migraines.

Remarkably, an immune system disorder might be mistaken for schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. (Happily, that immune system problem can be treated.)

Headline 5: For teachers, neuroscience is fascinating; psychology is useful

If you’re like me, you first got into Learning and the Brain conferences because the brain — the physical object — is utterly fascinating.

You want to know about neurons and synapses and the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex and the ventral tegmental area. (Ok, maybe not so much with the ventral tegmental area.)

Over all these years, I’ve remained fascinated by neuroscience. At the same time, I’ve come to understand that it rarely offers teachers concrete advice.

Notice: of the twenty headlines summarized above, only one of them really promises anything specific to teachers. If that ADHD study pans out, we might get all sorts of new ideas about diagnosing and treating students who struggle with attention in school.

The other 19 stories? They really don’t offer us much that’s practical.

The world of psychology, however, has all sorts of specific classroom suggestions for teachers. How to manage working memory overload? To foster attention? To promote motivation?

Psychology has concrete answers to all these questions.

And so, I encourage you to look over these articles because they broaden our understanding of brains and of neuroscience. For specific teaching advice, keep your eyes peeled for “the top 20 psychology stories of 2017.”

Andrew Watson

January 30, 2018

That Book You Were Just Reading…What Was It About?

A friend remembered to send me an article on the perils of forgetting.

In particular, if you read piles of books, you’re much less likely to remember the specifics of each one. The same holds true if you binge-watch This is Us or Mr. Robot. Or power your way through three movies in an afternoon.

Author Julie Beck explores the science behind this irksome truth.

For instance, she helpfully cites Betsy Sparrow’s research into the perils of Google. In brief, if I think a piece of information is available on Google, I’m less likely to remember it in the future.

Read the whole thing. And remember: quiz yourself about the article later…

[h/t Chris Brady]

Military Parents Serving Overseas: What Happens To The Children?

Andrew Watson

January 28, 2018

Military Parents Serving Overseas: What Happens To The Children?

We got a Twitter question earlier this week about the educational experience of military children. A quick review of the research suggests we can start to answer this question: does military deployment hinder learning for those children?

The most comprehensive study I found looks at data for over 56,000 (!) children. Researchers Engel, Gallagher, and Lyle wanted to know: when a parent goes away on deployment, what happens to their child’s academic performance?

Of course, parental absence might well upset children and prompt greater academic struggles. Children typically benefit from the structure that intact households can provide.

The researchers also hypothesize that deployment might improve academic performance. The child, they reason, might develop a greater sense of responsibility when one parent is away. Or, perhaps, the extra household income that comes from “hostile fire pay” might benefit learning.

So, which is it?

Military Deployment Hinders Learning, Slightly…

Engel, Gallagher, and Lyle found that a parent’s absence because of deployment does affect their children’s learning.

Specifically, deployment itself brings down standardized test scores 0.42%; each additional month prompts and additional 0.11% reduction. The averages are slightly higher in math and science, and lower in reading in social sciences and reading.

Importantly, these effects last. Engel & Co. found that these children were still slightly behind their peers four years later. By the fifth year, however, they had — on average — fully caught up.

The researchers got data only for those children who attend on-base schools. Engel & Co. argue that schools run by the military are better equipped to help these students than other school systems, and so the gaps may be even greater for children in school off base.

These data, by the way, come only from army bases. There’s no obvious reason that the numbers would be different for other branches of the military.

What to make of these numbers?

On the one hand, 0.11%/month hardly seems like much. That’s one tenth of a percentage point — hardly enough to notice.

On the other hand, those numbers add up quickly. For a 12-month deployment — with the initial decrement of 0.42% — that adds up to almost two full percentage points. Knowing that students experience even greater difficulties in math and science, we can genuinely worry about their progress in these disciplines.

And, this pattern creates problems for lots of families. In 2007, 700,000 children saw a parent leave on military deployment.

When we’re talking about that number of children, we should be keenly interested in helping.

How We Can Help?

In the first place, it’s important for teachers to know about these data. When a student’s parent deploys, we should be on the lookout for some initial academic difficulties. And, we should know that they might well increase over time.

Math and science teachers in particular should keep this potential on their radar.

The best way to help, of course, will vary. Perhaps a teacher can provide extra support and understanding. Perhaps a school has programs that provide much-needed structure.

We should also note that these problems might linger. Few of us are surprised that a child whose parent is leaving experiences distress, or that this distress might lead to academic struggle.

However, we might well be surprised that this struggle can last for years. And so, we should keep our eyes on those students whose parents have recently deployed, and also those whose parents have returned in the last few years.

At the same time, we should keep in mind that this research reports averages. Some students clearly struggle during this difficult time. However, not all of them do. Some might — as the researchers initially hypothesized — see a parent’s absence as a time to assume greater responsibility.

Clearly, student resilience is an important story in these data.

With this information in mind, teachers and schools can better serve the children whose parents are serving their country.

Beware: Too Much Structure Hinders Creativity (for Experts)

Andrew Watson

January 26, 2018

Beware: Too Much Structure Hinders Creativity (for Experts)

How can teachers foster our students’ creativity?

To explore that question, we can also reverse it: what inhibits creativity?

Two researchers at the University of Toronto wondered if information structure hinders creativity. That is: do we interfere with imaginative impulses if we give people information within clear and logical hierarchies.

If that’s true, could we encourage creativity by presenting information in unstructured ways?

100 Nouns

Kim and Zhong explored this possibility with two different research paradigms.

In the first, they gave college students lists of 100 nouns and asked them “to generate as many sentences as they want” using those words.

Half of these students were given nouns in obvious groupings. All the “games” were listed together: chess, bingo, backgammon. All the “bodies of water”: river, ocean, waterfall. All the “tools,” “pieces of jewelry,” and “trees.” In other words, students got these nouns within a clearly structured system.

The other half of the students saw those 100 nouns listed in a jumble: meteor, wildebeest, soccer, hotel, Ukraine. This second list, clearly, lacks any coherent system.

When the sentences that students wrote were rated for creativity, researchers found a clear difference. Students who saw nouns in a structured list wrote notably less creative sentences that those who saw the jumbled list.

For these students, logical structure hinders creativity. Absence of that structure promotes it.

Lego Aliens

To be sure of their conclusion, Kim and Zhong then asked different students to build an alien out of Lego bricks.

As you’ve already predicted, half of the participants got their Legos pre-sorted by shape and color. The other half got the same pieces all mixed together in a bin.

Here again, structure reduced creativity. Legos mixed together prompted more creative aliens than Legos sorted into tidy categories.

“Structure hinders creativity”: classroom implications

Reading this study, teachers who value creativity might be tempted to reduce cognitive structures as much as possible.

Here’s my advice: DON’T DO THAT.

Why? Beginners need structure to learn. This study was done with experts. College students are already very good at writing sentences. They devoted childhood years to building objects out of Lego.

In other words, they were not learning a new skill. They were, instead, being creative with a well-tuned skill.

For this reason, we should take this study as guidance for student creativity in skills they have already mastered. For skills they are still learning, students need lots of guidance, and structure.

A Bilingual Advantage in New Language Acquisition?

Andrew Watson

January 24, 2018

A Bilingual Advantage in New Language Acquisition?

According to this new study, bilinguals learn new languages faster than monolinguals.

To reach this conclusion, this research looked at brain wave signatures as participants learned an artificial language.

(Understanding electroencephalogram research is always tricky. Don’t feel bad if you’re not totally clear on what a P600 might be.)

The short version is this. As they learned this new language, neural patterns for bilinguals resembled native speaker patterns relatively quickly. Those patterns for the monolinguals developed more slowly.

Limitation to Bilingual Advantage Research

We can’t be sure that this finding extrapolates to the real world. After all, this particular artificial language has only 13 words in it–four nouns, two adjectives, two adverbs, and so forth.

However, the study does tentatively support a widely-believed conclusion: the hardest language to learn is the second…

(By the way: we’ve posted about the potential benefits and detriments of bilingual education several times in the last year. You can click on “bilingual education” in the tags list on the right to see other articles.)

Older posts

Newer posts

Outdoor Class Advantage: What We Know

Outdoor Class Advantage: Today’s News

The Results!

The Implications

What’s the Bigger Point?

Teachers Should Read Research Skeptically

Once More, with Feeling…

What do we know about musician memory?

The Plot Thickens

How do we interpret these differences?

Last Notes

Headline 1: Neuroscience can tell us such cool stuff!

Headline 2: Your gut is your “second brain”

Headline 3: Neuroscience and psychology disagree about definitions of ADHD

Headline 4: Each year we learn more about brain disorders

Headline 5: For teachers, neuroscience is fascinating; psychology is useful

Military Deployment Hinders Learning, Slightly…

What to make of these numbers?

How We Can Help?

100 Nouns

Lego Aliens

“Structure hinders creativity”: classroom implications

Limitation to Bilingual Advantage Research

Newsletter & Event Emails